


For the Ghosts

by iamsomebody



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Abstract, M/M, in canon to the best of my ability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:34:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23121817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamsomebody/pseuds/iamsomebody
Summary: Just two dead men.
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Kudos: 17





	For the Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> First overwatch piece and it’s a ficlet, might try my hand at a full fledged story for the two.
> 
> @satyr_legs on twitter

It was always better when it felt wrong. It was an understanding the two had come to know, had accepted and let flourish into poisonous veins hidden beneath their skin. The stale taste on their tongues would turn overwhelmingly sweet whenever they met, each stepping into position, each slipping into their role seamlessly. Theirs was a practiced routine, a dance that called them to be. A hand on the waist, a gun aimed at a chest, a mask falling off as another came on. A silent ballad, the lyrics long were forgotten and instead, wails and grief pervading the holy space in between them. 

“How are you alive?” one asks the other, honestly, earnestly, pleadingly. 

“Am I?” the other replies. 

For all intents and purposes, Jack Morrison was dead, simply a shadow left behind, haunting the scorched earth he dearly wished he was buried in. How far would a man have to fall in order to rest? 

“You should have stayed dead,” he says. 

The other laughs, and laughs, and laughs and the sound rattles the tired bones that made Morrison’s structure, the dust and ash left behind from victories and losses he had yet to forget sticking to the back of his throat. He was parched, but their dance was such a barren place. 

“I want to be,” he says. It’s a different time, a different verse in their song. He knows the steps but doesn’t feel his feet when they move, doesn’t know where his legs are leading him until they’re in between Reyes’. 

“You want to be what?” he asks. He doesn’t remember the question, doesn’t remember why he’s asking. 

“I want to be dead.”

He’s heard the words before, he’s seen lips form them before. Comrades with too much molten crimson staining their hair, their teeth, their broken arms---he hates them. He hates them and when he feels a sob beg to be heard, he bites into his tongue and goes silent. 

He wonders, sometimes, if he were to drop his gun, to not aim but run if Gabe would kill him. There are times he wants to do it, times where he aches to break their dance, to step out of line and be punished, but he never does. 

A hollow courtship, a run-on sentence, faint dreams that are hard to remember but always seem to be endless. 

_ How can you live with yourself?  _ He thinks. It’s a broken record, that thought. He thinks it over, and over and it makes him jaded, to see the way the blood on his hand won’t wash off. 

They meet at his grave, one day. It’s next to Gabe’s headstone, and when he shows up it isn’t Gabe, he knows it isn’t, but he wishes and he can imagine. He can imagine that he’s grounded, that Gabe’s physicality is still tied to his soul and that when he speaks, his voice doesn’t sound distant, constantly hissing with some type of invisible pain hidden in between his pauses and words. 

He doesn’t know why, but he reaches over and touches him. He doesn’t do this often, their dance doesn’t intersect much, but Gabe looks at him, and Morrison yearns. He feels how he’s yearned for more his entire life, and now there wasn’t anything else but this possible. 

“Two stupid, dead men,” Gabe says.

He doesn’t know what to say, so he stays silent. He listens to Gabe’s breathing and tightens his grip on him, arm shivering at the coldness of his sleeve, at the way it feels like trapped smoke. 

He hears their song start playing, but there are hiccups, sounds he doesn’t recognize interrupting the melody he has memorized. 

He remembers. He remembers the moon hanging in the dark sky and remembers the way the yellow lamplight from beside his bed shone on Gabe’s skin. He remembers the way he touched him, the way his body greedily took him in and how he had begged, how he would have kneeled for Gabe when he hadn’t for any other man or woman or person. 

“Our lives don’t stop until we’re in the dirt,” Gabe says. He can’t remember if the words belonged to the past or were in the present, but he listens. 


End file.
